It looks like the whole of the internet is becoming NoFollow. It's built into so many blogs, webmasters are clued up. To be honest with you, I don't enable any comments on any posts I make on my site because I know it will just be spammed with 'Nice Blog' comments.

If I did I certainly wouldn't allow web links, because so many times before I've seen this to be the only reason people take part. There are genuine comments out there, but these days, it's really hard to tell.

So what then. What is going to be a ranking factor then or am I missing something.

Is it nofollow just doesn't pass any link juice but contributes to a sites ranking factor in the SERPs?????

if your site deserves to stand out from all the other sites on exactly the same topic, i would rather have the search engines make this conclusion based on content, rather than on the number of dubious backlinks you've spewed all over the web

dariussutherland
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2011-12-08T19:50:23Z —
#3

That's what I am spending my days doing, writing content, getting people to submit content e.t.c I believe content is King or at least Deputy King but what would that matter if a competitors site, whom lets say I have better content but they have more links to that content, who's site do you think they will display...

felgall
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2011-12-08T20:27:41Z —
#4

People who think your content is genuinely worth linking to will link to it from their site without specifying nofollow. Only the links people are spamming other sites with to link back to their own site are being flagged as nofollow.

The distinction is with regard to who is adding the link - the owner of the site that the link is being added to or the owner of the site the link goes to.

Stevie_D
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2011-12-08T20:51:10Z —
#5

The internet is a lot bigger than blogs and forums. That's particularly true when you're looking at an SEO and link-building perspective. Yes, you can get a lot of links from blogs and forums, but even if they aren't "nofollow"ed, the chances are that Google won't pay them very much attention anyway, because user-generated content on inner pages is not the kind of content that Google ascribes a high quality or reputational value to.

The key is to get links from actual editorial authored content on real genuine websites. Ones where the website owner or author really is vouching for and recommending the link. Those kind of sites aren't going away. Proportionally, there may not be as many now, as social media is on its rampage, but I've not seen anything to suggest the actual number of such sites is falling off.

dariussutherland
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2011-12-08T21:12:02Z —
#6

Thanks guys.

I think I just needed some positive words in a world of SEO insanity...

warehouselarry
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2011-12-15T20:09:56Z —
#7

If Google truly cares about what is relevant, then it will soon have to disregard NoFollow. The places where people talk about how they truly feel about websites, and make honest recommendations, are typically NoFollow. By ignoring these links, Google is willingly blindfolding itself. Personally, I think NoFollow will be dead in a few years.

The idea of a NoFollow link is archaic. Its use and value is akin to the keywords meta tag. Google is far too smart these days and can certainly base the value of a link on surrounding context and does not need a NoFollow attribute to determine whether a link has value or not. Per using NoFollow to control the flow of "link juice"...again, I think Google has evolved far beyond such notions of things like link juice. These are antiquated notions. Build relevant links and don't waste time doing a "view source" for NoFollow.

felgall
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2011-12-16T01:30:10Z —
#8

warehouselarry said:

If Google truly cares about what is relevant, then it will soon have to disregard NoFollow.

I thought that Google only used that for calculating Page Rank where it is a clear instruction to not pass and thing to the linked page. I have never seen anything that suggests that it is used in any of the hundreds of other more significant tests that Google performs.

system
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2011-12-16T01:54:14Z —
#9

Stevie_D said:

The internet is a lot bigger than blogs and forums. That's particularly true when you're looking at an SEO and link-building perspective. Yes, you can get a lot of links from blogs and forums, but even if they aren't "nofollow"ed, the chances are that Google won't pay them very much attention anyway, because user-generated content on inner pages is not the kind of content that Google ascribes a high quality or reputational value to.

The key is to get links from actual editorial authored content on real genuine websites. Ones where the website owner or author really is vouching for and recommending the link. Those kind of sites aren't going away. Proportionally, there may not be as many now, as social media is on its rampage, but I've not seen anything to suggest the actual number of such sites is falling off.

I agree with Stevie. When actually making sure your content is top level, relevant, interesting and useful, you're more likely to get better links from these people than those who spam backlinks on forums all day. Then people who see those posts with your link, will check the links to yours and often times either relink the one that drew them in, or link directly back to you. Either way it's increasing the # of higher quality links which will help you more.

JJMcClure
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2011-12-16T10:58:05Z —
#10

dariussutherland said:

It looks like the whole of the internet is becoming NoFollow.

Never going to happen.

Stevie_D said:

The internet is a lot bigger than blogs and forums.

Ever heard of the 'deep net'? It's estimated that only 13% of the internet has been indexed by search engines because much of the rest isn't linked or is contained in databases that require an action to be accessed that a search engine bot can't accomplish. There are hundreds of thousands of huuuuge databases not indexed, the largest 4 of which are reputed to contain more information than the entire 'surface' web combined.

dariussutherland
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2011-12-16T11:39:41Z —
#11

warehouselarry said:

If Google truly cares about what is relevant, then it will soon have to disregard NoFollow. The places where people talk about how they truly feel about websites, and make honest recommendations, are typically NoFollow. By ignoring these links, Google is willingly blindfolding itself. Personally, I think NoFollow will be dead in a few years.

The idea of a NoFollow link is archaic. Its use and value is akin to the keywords meta tag. Google is far too smart these days and can certainly base the value of a link on surrounding context and does not need a NoFollow attribute to determine whether a link has value or not. Per using NoFollow to control the flow of "link juice"...again, I think Google has evolved far beyond such notions of things like link juice. These are antiquated notions. Build relevant links and don't waste time doing a "view source" for NoFollow.

Those are my thoughts too, but who knows what will happen.

To be honest, I don't see why google would even bother counting blog comment backlinks. If we know they are used for spamming then surely they do, obviously not all the time. It's one thing a blogger linking to another persons website but blog comments. Why should they actually count, it's clearly been dropped in to get the link count up in many cases.

A quality link is when a site of a similar niche rates another persons site, so is either writing about it or telling other people about it.

dariussutherland
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2011-12-16T11:41:51Z —
#12

JJMcClure said:

Never going to happen.

Ever heard of the 'deep net'? It's estimated that only 13% of the internet has been indexed by search engines because much of the rest isn't linked or is contained in databases that require an action to be accessed that a search engine bot can't accomplish. There are hundreds of thousands of huuuuge databases not indexed, the largest 4 of which are reputed to contain more information than the entire 'surface' web combined.

Okay. If that's the case, then due to this, even if they had dofollow they would be useless in terms of SEO. I am talking about the indexed sites that are crawled.

JJMcClure
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2011-12-16T13:57:53Z —
#13

dariussutherland said:

Okay. If that's the case, then due to this, even if they had dofollow they would be useless in terms of SEO. I am talking about the indexed sites that are crawled.

Yeah I know, the deepnet thing wasn't for you, I was replying to something Stevie said.

Wordpress (and other blogs) pages are still indexed even if the links in the comments aren't followed and Google can still find the sites those people were linking to because if they're blog spamming to get links they'll most likely be link dropping elsewhere so the bot will stil find and index them. Your wordpress being nofollow is unlikely to stop other sites being indexed.

warehouselarry said:

If Google truly cares about what is relevant, then it will soon have to disregard NoFollow.

Why would they ignore something they invented, that doesn't make sense. It was invented to discourage spam and it still does that job. The people who were doing the spamming are still finding ways to get their sites indexed, they're just not spamming blogs as much, so it doesn't affect the content of the index and blog owners have less blam to deal with.

Nofollow isn't going anywhere IMO.

warehouselarry
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2011-12-16T18:29:19Z —
#14

JJMcClure said:

Yeah I know, the deepnet thing wasn't for you, I was replying to something Stevie said.

Wordpress (and other blogs) pages are still indexed even if the links in the comments aren't followed and Google can still find the sites those people were linking to because if they're blog spamming to get links they'll most likely be link dropping elsewhere so the bot will stil find and index them. Your wordpress being nofollow is unlikely to stop other sites being indexed.

Why would they ignore something they invented, that doesn't make sense. It was invented to discourage spam and it still does that job. The people who were doing the spamming are still finding ways to get their sites indexed, they're just not spamming blogs as much, so it doesn't affect the content of the index and blog owners have less blam to deal with.

Nofollow isn't going anywhere IMO.

Actually, it makes complete sense. Any technology that wishes to grow, improve, and ultimately yield better results will routinely ignore, abandoned or alter technologies that even it has invented and put in place. In fact, Google has done this numerous times since its inception.

You may be right that NoFollow is going nowhere...I'm sure it will be around as long as the keywords meta tag has been, and just as useful.

felgall
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2011-12-16T20:15:04Z —
#15

JJMcClure said:

Ever heard of the 'deep net'? It's estimated that only 13% of the internet has been indexed by search engines because much of the rest isn't linked or is contained in databases that require an action to be accessed that a search engine bot can't accomplish.

That's 13% of the web - not the entire internet - the search engines don't even look at any of the other parts of the internet apart from the web and that in itself is only a small part of the internet (email is still the biggest of the dozens of parts to the internet).

moneypro
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2011-12-17T17:56:03Z —
#16

They are stupid who say nofollow links are worthless. You need dofollow backlinks only for increasing your page rank. But if you want to improve serp you need both relevant nofollow and dofollow. As a SEO expert I can assure this statement that nofollow backlinks are worthy if you know to get relevant backlinks. In case you don't believe I can deliver proofs of my some screenshot.

Thanks from,Shoaib Ibn Abdullah

JJMcClure
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2011-12-28T12:23:59Z —
#17

felgall said:

(email is still the biggest of the dozens of parts to the internet).

You're basing that on what?

"Estimates based on extrapolations from a study done at University of California, Berkeley in the year 2001[3] , speculate that the deep Web consists of about 91,000 terabytes. By contrast, the surface Web (which is easily reached by search engines) is about 167 terabytes" http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Invisible_Web

If the above sentence is true, then the volumes of email being sent (or stored? not even sure what your sentence means), would have to be in excess of 91k Tb, which is pretty unlikely.

felgall
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2011-12-28T20:03:09Z —
#18

JJMcClure said:

If the above sentence is true, then the volumes of email being sent (or stored? not even sure what your sentence means), would have to be in excess of 91k Tb, which is pretty unlikely.

91 Petabyes (there's no such thing as k Tb) is a small fraction of the amount of spam currently sent each year. Some spammers send a signifiicant fraction of that all by themselves. Fortunately most of that spam drops almost immediately into a black hole or it would bring the internet to a complete stop.

ozsubasi
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2011-12-29T11:15:45Z —
#19

There are so many different opinions about nofollow that it is impossible to know for sure what the real situation is. Google webmaster tools lists them, but then apparently takes no notice of them, which doesn't make sense to me.

JJMcClure
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2012-01-01T13:00:21Z —
#20

felgall said:

91 Petabyes (there's no such thing as k Tb) is a small fraction of the amount of spam currently sent each year. Some spammers send a signifiicant fraction of that all by themselves. Fortunately most of that spam drops almost immediately into a black hole or it would bring the internet to a complete stop.

So it's not stored so it's not relevant to a conversation about the estimated stored deepnet content or even worth mentioning really. Thanks for proving my point.

May I make a suggestion? Stating your opinions as if they were fact is confusing and unhelpful and your case might be helped if you could, once in a while at least, link source evidence to support your assertions.